Capturing the Communication Context of Virtual Communities of Practice Päivi Pöyry, Toni Koskinen & Marko Nieminen Software Business and Engineering Institute, Helsinki University of Technology P.O. Box 9210, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland
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Abstract This paper reports a case study focusing on the challenges in the communication context of these virtual communities of practice. The study was carried out in a globally operating telecommunications company and it comprises 19 semi-structured interviews with employees working in distributed organisations. The interview data was analysed with qualitative content analysis after which interaction diagrams were generated. In addition, the appropriateness of using interaction diagrams as a research method is evaluated. The results indicate that the challenges of communicating and sharing knowledge in virtual CoPs are related to the communication artifacts, to the ICT mediated ways to interact, and to the current work processes and practices.
1
Introduction
The concept of communities of practice (CoP) has attracted many researchers in the field of organizational research and knowledge management since the beginning of the 90s when Lave and Wenger introduced the term (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1996). During the years many definitions emphasizing different aspects of CoPs have been introduced. Some of them emphasize the informal nature of CoPs and others the relationship between knowledge processes related to social and organizational contexts. Usually the CoPs are referred to as informal networks of people, each sharing a common agenda and shared interests or issues. In many geographically distributed organizations, trends towards flexible working and globalization have led to interest in supporting dispersed CoPs (virtual communities of practice) using information and communication technology. The challenge of many organizations is to support such communities and make them effective in order to manage and foster their knowledge assets. This paper presents findings from a case study that was carried out in a globally operating Finnish telecommunications company. The goal of the study was to identify the elements of the communication context of three globally acting virtual communities of practice (VCoP). These VCoPs were considered successful and efficient within the organization participating in this study, and therefore it was particularly interesting to identify the success factors, challenges, and communication context of these communities. In addition to presenting the findings from the case study, this paper evaluates how well the used methods are suited to this kind of research.
2
Objective of the Study
The objective of the study is both to identify the basic elements in the communication context of virtual communities of practice and to describe and analyze the process and methods that were used in identifying and presenting the communication context. The applicability and suitability of
the method is evaluated as well. This paper aims to answer the following research questions on the basis of this case study: 1. What are the challenges related to communicating and sharing knowledge in virtual communities of practice? 2. Can the interaction diagrams as a visualization technique facilitate user participation during the evaluation of work context? What are the benefits of utilizing the interaction diagrams?
3
Virtual Communities at Work
Virtual work that is often referred to also as distributed work, has been defined as a form of work that is characterised by both a geographical distance between the employees and a need to work in co-operation with the remote colleagues. Virtual work is usually done in virtual teams that are created for a specific purpose; the teams are dissolved when they have fulfilled their goals. (Watson-Manheim & Belanger, 2000.) In the virtual teams the social processes are relatively similar to the ones in traditional teams, but the distance and the use of information and communication technology as a mediator for interaction and communication creates challenges. Capability of supporting the sense of community is crucial for the success of a virtual team or community. (Blanchard & Markus, 2002.) Nardi et al. (2000) emphasize the importance of personal networks in the knowledge work of today where the rapid organisational changes have led to reduced access to resources provided by the formal organisation. The traditional roles, clearly defined tasks, and stable organisational forms are disappearing and being replaced by constant fluctuation, virtual teams, and requirements for continuous renewal. The success in the work tasks depends to a greater extent on the network of social contacts created and maintained during the career. These networks may take the form of communities of practice, intensional networks, knotworking, or coalitions. These networks exist basically because people need to work together, solve problems in collaboration, and exchange knowledge related to the work. (Nardi, Whittaker & Schwarz, 2000.) Online communities for their part, consist of people who interact with the help of computer systems, and have a shared purpose for the interaction, such as information exchange (Preece, 2000). Furthermore, communities of practice, which are by definition closely related to online communities, have proved to have potential for sharing knowledge and supporting organisational learning. The motivation for the interaction lies in the value of sharing and fostering information and knowledge as a community. (Wenger, Dermott & Snyder, 2002; Penuel & Cohen, 2003.) In this paper the focus is on communities of practice, more specifically the virtual ones operating online. Companies coping with the challenges of the globalizing knowledge economy rely increasingly on communities of practice (CoP) when building their knowledge strategies. As communities of practice are able to keep up with the rapid pace of development they enable companies to manage their knowledge capital systematically. The communities of practice have been defined as selforganised groups that share common interest, goals or interests related to their work. The members of these communities communicate with each other in order to share experiences and to solve problems emerging from their workpractices. (Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Wenger et al, 2002.) CoPs help the individual members to better accomplish their tasks with the help of the information and knowledge acquired by participating in CoPs’ activities. In many organisations the phenomenon of multimembership is quite common: people belong to both workgroups or teams for doing the daily business and to communities of practice for sharing and fostering knowledge, skills, and expertise with their peers. (Wenger et al., 2002.)
Today many of the CoPs are distributed in terms of time and physical distance. Consequently, they have to resort extensively to information and communication technology (ICT) based tools for interacting and communicating. In these virtual CoPs the sense of togetherness may become weaker than in the local communities. Moreover, the conflicting priorities stemming from multimembership, cultural differences, language difficulties, and lack of personal contacts may hinder the virtual CoPs from performing as effectively as local CoPs. (Wenger et al., 2002.) Even though ICT can be applied in various ways to enable and support creating and sharing knowledge in organisations, the underlying social practices determine to a considerable extent the efficiency of these processes. The interaction occurring in CoPs is closely tied to the context and activities of the community because a CoP shares a culture, i.e. common practices, values, concepts etc. that enable knowledge sharing to take place through social interaction. (Pemberton-Billing, Cooper & North, 2003.) The challenge related to using ICT in virtual CoPs is one of the issues addressed in this paper.
4
Ethnographic Approach and Our Previous Research
For several years there has been an interest towards developing methods and practices for early usability assessment as well as user-integration and participation in the design process. Such methods as the cognitive walkthrough (Polson, Lewis, Rieman & Wharton, 1992) and paper prototypes (Virzi, Sokolov & Karis, 1996) have been introduced to provide possibilities for user interface evaluation before any real implementation has been carried out. The restriction that relates to these methods is that they poorly take into account of the contextual elements of the future or existing use situation. As ISO 13407 (1999) states, the systems will be used in a context and without proper understanding of the contextual elements (users, tasks, environment, and tools) the results from usability assessment could be inaccurate – or even in some cases misleading. In recent years ethnographic approach has been considered as a promising direction for understanding the users' environment. Ethnography-based analyses have been even considered as the baseline for all design as is reflected in the Contextual Design methodology (Beyer & Holzblatt, 1998). Contextual Design has its origins in the Contextual Inquiry (Holtzblatt & Jones, 1993; Whiteside, Bennett & Holtzblatt, 1988), an ethnography-based interview technique whose results form the input for the forthcoming design activities. Another, rather similar interview technique to contextual inquiry is ethnographic interview. In ethnographic interview the team approach to contextual inquiry is applied. Small teams or pairs share the activities of interviewing, note taking, and photographing or collecting artefacts (Anschuetz & Rosenbaum, 2003). These methods have partially filled in the need of mapping and understanding the contextual elements. In our previous work (Nieminen, Koskinen, Korpilahti & Jormanainen, 2004; Koskinen, Korpilahti & Jormanainen, 2004) we have applied ethnographic interview during data collection stage and interaction diagrams for presenting the communication context of the distributed teams. In general the use of interaction diagrams has aimed at supporting the design of the features for technology-mediated collaboration tools in the distributed work environment. The interaction diagrams are created to describe the communication aspects of work context of subjects, in this particular study experts working in telecommunication business. The interaction diagrams from different users can be joined together to describe larger organizational units. They also point out problems in existing work environments. These models can be evaluated together with the same users that were originally interviewed. This for instance enables the end-users to provide realistic comments within the design process and share further knowledge about their work context.
Based on our previous studies (Koskinen et al., 2004; Nieminen et al., 2004) the use of interaction diagrams has provided promising results in the verification and validation of the current and future context-of-use. Particularly the evaluation stage carried out together with the users has been considered useful for understanding the work context. The interaction diagrams have proven to provide at the same time both overall and detailed enough presentation, which enables to analyze the context-of-use at multiple levels simultaneously. It is possible to have a look at the overall organisational level but it has seemed to be also very easy to discuss the details in depth in a specific part of the diagram. Also the possibility to make focusing remarks and changes to the diagram by drawing additional lines and even systems or stakeholders to it made it an evolving verification and documentation design tool. Our previous results indicate that the evaluation of interaction diagrams will considerably deepen and focus the understanding of the communication context. As interaction diagrams present topics and concepts from the users’ own environment, users seem to be fully capable of discussing broadly about the contents of the interaction diagram – and, therefore, about their own work environment with the researchers and designers.
5
Research Environment
The case study consists of three business cases from the company participating in this research. These three cases were defined as best practice cases, in which sharing knowledge have been considered as successful according to the company’s criteria. The business cases were analysed in order to identify the elements of the communication context in virtual communities of practice. The idea was to examine three cases in order to identify the common elements in addition to the case-specific ones. The first business case deals with a mailing list that includes ca. 200 members from the company’s organisational unit whose employees are located all over the world. The members of the mailing list come from several teams, countries, and cultures, but the connecting factor between them is their work that deals with creating and integrating customer-specific mobile software solutions. The purpose of the mailing list is to enable its members to exchange information and knowledge that is based on their personal experiences from the projects they have been working on. The second business case deals with a tendering team specialized in creating bids to the potential customers of the company. Creating bids requires expertise, experiences, and knowledge from several competence areas. In addition to this requirement for multiprofessionality, the basic challenge is that both the team members and the customers are scattered all over the world. Continuous learning and knowledge sharing is crucial for the team in creating successful bids. The third business case is concerned with a team responsible for hardware services in a certain European region. The team members are located in different countries, but they are working closely together as a virtual team with the help of ICT tools. The work in this team is multiprofessional and the competencies are learned to a great extent by doing the work in practice. Information and knowledge based on experiences has to be exchanged continuously within the team in order to work efficiently.
6 6.1
Implementation of the Study Data Gathering and Analysis
The research approach in this case study was user centered, starting from the users’ perspective. The goal was to understand the work from the interviewee’s perspective in order to produce a realistic description of it. In this research it was not possible to go to the workplaces of all participants because they were located in many different countries. It was decided to use thematic interviews carried out as call conferences in case the interviewee was not located in Finland. However, the members of the third business case were interviewed in Germany during the team meeting. Altogether 19 interviews were conducted in the three business cases. The interviews were semi-structured, i.e. based on pre-defined themes. Two interviewers carried out most of the interviews together, and the discussions were recorded. The interview data was analyzed qualitatively using inductive content analysis. Based on the data analysis, an interaction diagram was created for each business case separately. The interaction diagrams aim at describing communication context of virtual work and knowledge sharing. The interaction models used in this study are closely related to the flow models used in the Contextual Design. Interaction diagrams present the following information in a single diagram: • The human actors (stakeholders/roles) and their work-information-related interaction • Organizational actors (organizational units) that support the work of human actors • Artifacts (information systems, documents, applications and other supporting tools) • Information flows (and related activities) between actors and systems • Breakdowns or problems in information flows or working activities The case-specific interaction diagrams presenting the communication context of the interviewees were created through organizing and grouping the analyzed interview data with Post-it notes. The levels of analysis were: • Communication and knowledge sharing between individual member and the team • Communication and knowledge sharing between the case team and other teams/organisational units inside the Company After the individual interaction diagrams were validated among the representatives from the three business cases, a generic interaction diagram was created to illustrate the common elements comprising the communication context of virtual knowledge sharing communities. The elements included in this generic interaction diagram were found in all three cases. The generic model is presented in details in Section 7 of this paper.
6.2
Evaluation of the Findings
The goal of the evaluation was to validate the initial findings and to gather additional, more focused information about the communication context. Firstly, validation was needed in order to find out whether the findings matched the perceptions of the subjects of the study. Secondly, additional questions arose during the analysis process, and detailed information was needed in order to answer them. The case-specific interaction diagrams were presented to the members of the case teams that were involved in the interviews. Altogether five people took part in the evaluation, i.e. one or two from each business case. The evaluation sessions were carried out as thematic, individual interviews that lasted ca. 90 minutes each. The interaction diagrams were
walked through point by point with the participants. The discussions were facilitated with the help of a thematic framework, and also the interaction diagrams elicited fruitful discussion. Based on the results of the evaluation, the interaction models were revised slightly.
7
Results of the Case Study
The final generic interaction diagram in Figure 1 presents the communication context of the studied virtual communities of practice, from the perspective of an individual member. In general, the identified actors of knowledge sharing were: the individual group/community member, local team members, virtual team members, other teams within the organization, and customer and partner organizations. The central artefacts used in knowledge sharing were: project and product documentation, agreements and tendering documents, reports, and meeting minutes. Also various information systems and tools were used for communication and sharing knowledge. These included: information repositories and databases, special knowledge sharing tools, and the Company’s Intranet. The ways of interaction included: phone discussions, email exchange, faceto-face meetings and discussions, and virtual meetings (e.g. Netmeeting), Knowledge sharing tools -Experience-based knowledge -Advice & Discussions -Templates -Guidelines, Process models -Existing documentation
Information repositories and databases -Documentation -Reporting -Meeting minutes
Storing documents Looking for knowledge and support
Looking for information and documents
1)Too many tools in use 2)Not all documents stored in a shared repository Project documentation Local team members
Discussing the work related problems F2F
Virtual team members Project documentation
Phone, Netmeeting email
Sharing information and knowledge
Lack of time
Other teams and people at the Company
Communication of work related issues
Project/product documentation
Documents often only in All documentation own computer Too few F2F not available easily meetings
Exchanging product or customer specific information
Too little information from other org. units Member of the knowledge sharing community -Works in the field of telecommunication -Member of a distributed organisation -Needs to update skills and share knowledge continuously
Discussing the requirements and developing solutions
Information and expertise exists but it is not easy to find!
Looking for information about projects and products; people and expertise; processes and procedures
Project documentation, agreements
Business-related communication
Tender documents
Project documentation, agreements
Phone, Netmeeting email Company's Intranet -Information on people and threir responsibilities -Information about projects -Information about products -Information about processes and procedures -Other documentation
Partner organisations
Customer organisations
Figure 1. Generic interaction diagram of the studied virtual knowledge sharing communities
The notation of the interaction diagram includes the following symbols: • Circles – employees, roles, or other actors that communicate • Arrows – relationships between the employees or roles, and the topic of communication • Boxes – artefacts, applications, systems, documentation etc. used in communication • Lightnings – shortcomings, problems in communication In the following chapters the challenges identified in this case study are elaborated in detail.
7.1
Challenges of Sharing Knowledge in Virtual Work
In the three business cases studied, there were several information systems or repositories in use for supporting knowledge and information sharing, such as the company intranet, document management systems, databases, shared network drives, team workspaces etc. These tools were used regularly for storing and sharing project documentation, team documents such as meeting minutes, and reports. However, on the basis of the interviews it became apparent that there were too many information systems in use simultaneously. Moreover, the systems were at least partly overlapping with each other in terms of functionality and the purpose of usage. This created challenges as the interviewees experienced it difficult to locate documents. This was also true for the company’s intranet; people knew that there was lots of information available but it was not easy to find the needed information. The other artifacts, or tools used in virtual work for communicating and sharing knowledge included phone, email, and online meeting facilities. There were plenty of call conferences for the virtual team members, and during these conferences documents were often shared with the help of online meeting tools. Email exchange was also frequent among the virtual workers. Project and product documentation, such as tendering documents and agreements were shared and exchanged with local and virtual team members, with other teams at the company, and with partner and customer organisations. Document exchange inside the company for its part did not function fluently due to the insufficient contacts between the different teams and groups within the organisation. Not all the needed documents were available, and in some cases necessary information was missing in these documents as the information needs of other teams were not wholly understood by the teams producing the documentation. Even though also face-to-face meetings were arranged, they were scarce while most of the communication was virtual, i.e. mediated by ICT tools. Only with the local team members it was possible to discuss the work-related issues regularly. This created challenges: as there were too little direct interaction in the form of face-to-face meetings, the virtual communication was experienced as troublesome and demanding especially when people did not know each other personally. Call conferences were reported as ineffective for solving work-related problems and for communicating the issues emerging when doing the tasks, as they did not support rich enough interaction. However, the use of technology in itself was not seen as problematic; instead the scarcity of direct, face-to-face interaction and communication was seen as an obstacle. In addition, it was not always obvious where to find the right person to communicate with because the organisational roles were changing continuously. Multimembership was identified as a remarkable factor affecting the work in this case study: people belonged to both local teams and virtual teams and even to some knowledge sharing communities at the same time. Conflicting priorities were detected in some cases, and due to the business pressures the knowledge sharing activities were not on first priority, and there was simply
too little time for communicating the lessons learned and sharing the knowledge with the colleagues. Even though the interviewees claimed that the work practices were rather uniform throughout the company, the findings of this study indicate that at least the work practices and processes related to handling information and knowledge may vary considerably. In general, the teams seemed to lack a common way of sharing and storing documents and other information. There were no explicit strategies or guidelines for utilizing the information systems, and as a result, not all relevant documents were stored in the information repositories. People stored and shared their documents through personal contacts, but often the documents were left in their personal repositories only, which complicated locating and sharing them. Furthermore, even though in some cases common principles and processes existed, they were not followed very well. The interviewees had varying conceptions of their team’s processes, practices, and guidelines, and as people followed these personal ways of working, the processes and practices as a whole became incoherent.
7.2
Reflections on Applying the Interaction Diagrams
As earlier mentioned, based on the data analysis of interviews interaction diagrams were created for each business cases. During the evaluation stage these interaction diagrams were walked through with the participants. Besides validating the results presented in the interaction models, we also studied whether the interaction diagrams encouraged interviewees to give comments and generate new discussions related to topics under consideration. Comparing to our previous experiences from applying this method the results were slightly different. In our previous studies (Koskinen et al., 2004; Nieminen et al., 2004) we have noticed that the evaluation of interaction diagrams will considerably deepen and focus the understanding of the context-of-use. This time the interaction diagrams facilitated some new discussions and also some focusing remarks were added to the models, but in general the initial models were considered to be quite accurate according to interviewees. Therefore the discussion about the contents of the interaction diagram was not as active as during the previous studies. We consider that this is mainly due to the fact that in our previous studies the interaction diagrams have been applied to process control domain, which can be considered more complex domain to capture into the interaction diagrams. In our previous studies the interaction diagrams facilitated active discussions, because the models presented to the interviewees during the evaluation stage were not as accurate as in this study. Otherwise the interaction diagrams were considered understandable by interviewees and they enabled users to give accurate comments about some specific details presented in the model as well as give broad comments about the wider aspects of communication context.
8
Discussion
The literature about virtual work communities and CoPs mentions such challenges as using ICT as mediator for communication, conflicting priorities arising from multimembership, the lack of personal contacts, and the ability to support a sense of community (see Section 3). These elements were identified in this case study as well. Both the ways of using ICT and the ICT itself created challenges. Need for integration and harmonization of both the ICT-based tools and the ways of using them became evident on the basis of our findings. Also locating information from the systems could be easier. Furthermore, the lack of personal contacts and a feeling of community were identified as challenges also in this study; these factors are related to the interviewees’ perceptions of having too little face-to-face interaction and getting too little information from
other organisational units. The challenge here is to improve communication and document exchange between the different teams and organisational units inside the company. Face-to-face interaction appeared to be surprisingly significant in the studied virtual work communities. Also according to Wenger et al. (2002) creating a feeling of community requires face-to-face gettogethers at least sometimes, after which maintaining this feeling via ICT based tools is possible. Furthermore, providing support for richer interaction in virtual work and better communication across team boundaries would be clearly needed. Finally, more time should be allocated for sharing knowledge with the remote colleagues in order to boost re-use of existing knowledge and creation of new knowledge. Regarding the interaction diagrams they seem to have capability to facilitate user participation during the evaluation of the work context. However, the amount of user comments and feedback depends on the accuracy level of the interaction model. It is likely that incomplete models will facilitate more discussions than accurate ones. Even though the interaction diagrams as a visualization technique simplify the reality of complex communication and organizational networks, they seem to have certain advantages that were also noticed during the study. They provide an efficient way to discuss and further elaborate the findings together with the subjects, because they present the topics and concepts that are familiar to subjects. Secondly the visualization of the models is flexible enough to describe and combine the elements of the communication context of both local and virtual co-operation. The future research will focus on more detailed elaboration of a couple of topics found out in this study. The significance of face-to-face interaction in virtual work is an interesting topic for further research. It would be useful to understand the underlying factors affecting the need to communicate face-to-face. Also the networking and communication between different groups and teams within an organisation needs to be studied further. With regard to the methods used, in future research we aim at further improving the interaction diagrams by e.g. adding elements for more detailed stakeholder characteristics and possibilities for describing specific task sequences and considering the appropriate accuracy level of information to be included in the models.
Acknowledgements This study was carried out in the research project TechMedia (www.soberit.hut.fi/techmedia) funded by the National Technology Agency of Finland (www.tekes.fi) and participating companies (Nokia Corporation, Metso Corporation, Metso Automation, Metso Paper, Fortum Service, and Jyväskylä Science Park).
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